ISSNIP

Bimonthly Newsletter

Volume 1, Issue 1

April 2007

Greetings. I am most pleased to introduce this bimonthly publication to sensor networks and information processing researchers. The objective of this newsletter is to stimulate research interests, provide support for students, and promote international, local, industrial and educational linkages. It is my hope that through this newsletter, researchers and organizations can come together to organize workshops and seminars to explore collaborative opportunities for mutual benefits. Im looking for your suggestions to make this exchange most valuable for you and your colleagues.

In this issue, we will give you a glimpse into the research activities of a research group at the University of Melbourne. The next issue will cover other node activities and collaborations. We will also review some activities that have taken place last year. At the same time, we are also announcing several prizes/awards to stimulate research interests and collaboration within the ISSNIP community.

We look forward to this year as a successful year in sensor network research and collaborations. Hope you enjoy this publication, and look forward to your contributions to future issues.

Table of Contents

Overview of ISSNIP-Melbourne Node's Research

These few years have seen a tremendous amount of research activities in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). We see real interests coming from agriculture, several segments of the manufacturing industry and science. Here in the University of Melbourne, a node of ISSNIP, short for Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing, has been established with the mission of taking WSNs a step further by fusing it with other well-established scientific disciplines. Our initial goal is to add value to Australian businesses, in the areas of defence, heath-care and environment.

Our primary research interests include, but are not limited to, flow control,security, localisation,biomedical and environmental applications (Figure 1).We cover a few topics here to give you an idea of current activities.

Figure 1 Focus areas of ISSNIP (gold-colored).

Activities

Localization

A lot of applications require localization support. Although many schemes are already available, Alistair Shilton and Bharat Sundaram are getting promising results by applying techniques in Support Vector Regression, and have developed a new methodology called Complex Support Vector Regression to tackle the problem.

Biomedical Applications

Falls in the elderly Australian society cost the government at least 2 billion AUD annually. Rezaul Begg,Ahsan Habib Khandoker, Daniel Lai and Slaven Marusic are looking for a way to detect and estimate the probability (or risk) of a person falling. Currently, they are investigating the sensitivity of the minimum foot clearance (MFC) as a gait variable for classification using signal processing techniques together with SVM classification [1].

EnvironmentalApplications

Marine biologists discovered that water temperature plays an important role in the disintegration of coral reefs. Stuart Kininmonth from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), and Stefan Dulman and Supriyo Chatterjea from the University of Twente collaborated in developing sensor networks for monitoring water temperature at the Great Barrier Reef.

Flow Control

The principal researchers are Jiong Jin,Weihua Wang andJinsheng Sun. Their main concern is theflow control and resource allocation problem for heterogeneousWSNs which consist of diverse sensor types and applications. Recently they have proposed a distributed algorithm for the transport layer that allocates bandwidth among sensor nodes so that certain performance guarantees are provided for sensor nodes [2].

Security

There is a lot of focus on security in the group, because security is a cross-layer concern in WSNs. As networks become more specialized, nodes become more low-cost and security becomes more critical, we envision and predict that some nodes of the network will be dedicated to security functions, especially in military applications. One such security function is intrusion detection and response.Sutharshan Rajasegarar, Chris Leckie and James Bezdek (foreign collaborator) have been using support vector machines (SVM) for anomaly detection [3]. Another security function, interestingly, on the attacker side, is energy-efficient link-layer jamming, where the bad guys use sensor-scale motes to launch distributed and energy-efficient jamming attacks. Researcher Yee Wei Law is gauging the practical impact of such attacks, by trying to predict link-layer traffic using machine intelligence.

On the more conventional front,Yee Wei Law is working on several areas. In key management, he is looking at the problem of k-connectivity of the pseudorandom key pre-distribution scheme. In information security, he is looking at the efficient implementation of asymmetric-key ciphers and protocols.

[2] Jiong Jin, Wei-Hua Wang and Marimuthu Palaniswami. Application-Oriented Flow Control for Wireless Sensor Networks, the Third International Conference on Networking and Services (ICNS), 2007. To appear.

Past Activities

ISSNIP has organized numerous events since its existence. We will review the conferences, workshops, education-related events and seminars that have taken place last year (2006), to give you a taste of the active role played by ISSNIP.

Conferences

The FirstEuropean Conference on Smart Sensing and Context(EuroSSC 2006) was held on 25th-27th October 2006 in Enschede, the Netherlands. The conference, chaired by Partner Investigator, Paul Havinga, sought to explore the underlying techniques, protocols, architectures and algorithms for smart surroundings with intelligent, networked and co-operating objects. The conference accepted 29 papers (at an acceptance rate of 27%), from researchers across Europe, Asia and North America, and was attended by approximately 100 researchers. The success of the event and ISSNIP researcher involvement has prompted organisers to hold a symposium on the same area at the ISSNIP 2007 conference in Melbourne.

The First International Workshop on Middleware for Sensor Networks (MIDSENS 2006) was held on the 28th November 2006 in Melbourne, Australia. The aim of this workshop was to stimulate research in the specific domain of middleware for WSNs, to collect current expertise, and to further refine and integrate different approaches.

The Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks in Biomedicine was held on the 21st November 2006 in Sydney, Australia. This one-day workshop was targeted at researchers and practitioners of WSNs for biomedical applications. By bringing together experience in biomedical applications, and expertise in wireless devices and networking protocols, this workshop aimed to foster inter-disciplinary research collaborations.

TheFifth Ballarat Workshop on Global and Non-Smooth Optimization: Theory, Methods and Applicationswas held on the 28th-30th November 2006 in Ballarat, Australia. The workshop brought together experts from Australia, the Pacific region and around world in the area of optimization theory, methods and applications. The topics included different areas of optimization, optimal control and their applications, with an emphasis on theory, numerical methods and applications of global and non-smooth optimization. The workshop also incorporated a one-day focus meeting on global and non-smooth optimisation problems in data analysis and engineering. The workshop was also dedicated to the memory of Prof Alexander Rubinov.

TheDEST-ISL Workshop on Distributed Sensor Networkswas held on the7th December 2006in Melbourne, Australia. The invitation-only event was aimed at strengthening ties between the ISSNIP Research Network and the Coral Reef Environmental Observatory Network (CREON), with the exploration of potential collaborative research opportunities featuring heavily on the agenda.

Participants of the DEST-ISL workshop.

The timing of the workshop was such that the attendants could also take the chance to participate in the ISSNIP Summer School.

The ISSNIPEarly Career Researcher Workshop on Sensor Networkswas held on the 6th December 2006 in Melbourne, Australia. The workshop was held in conjunction with The Australian Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (ATNAC 2006). The ECR workshop targeted PhD students and recent PhD graduates with a view on generating new research collaborations in the themes of ISSNIP.

TheISSNIP Summer Schoolwas held on the 8th-9th December 2006 in Melbourne, Australia. The ARC Research Network on ISSNIP presented the two-day summer school encompassing different areas of sensor networks research, ranging from security, flow control, middleware, dynamic topology configuration to application issues in environmental sensing. This offered a unique opportunity for the students to learn from a number of invited Australian and international experts in these respective areas.

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Attendants of the ISSNIP Summer School 2006

Education

To help the students and researchers keep abreast with advances in the field, various workshops and summer schools were organised from time to time. In particular, ISSNIP paid great attention to Early Career Research candidates. In this section, we review some of the education-oriented workshops that have taken place.

Seminars

The ISSNIP Research Network is dedicated to supporting the visits of distinguished international researchers. During their visits, the researchers would give presentations including keynote and plenary talks. Detailed here are but a selection of the ISSNIP-supported visits in 2006.

Prof T. Dallessio visited RMITin January 2006 as a guest of A/P Dinesh Kant Kumar under the funding of the University of Roma Tre, Italy. The visit included a seminar on Human Movement Sensing without Markers. A valuable outcome of this visit included the production of a joint ARC discovery application. Also, Dinesh Kumar was provided with a Visiting Scholarship to University of Roma Tre, as well as a joint editorial for a special edition of Journal of Neural Engineering.

Prof H. Weghorn from the University of Stuttgart BA, Germany, visited RMIT in April 2006 as a guest of A/P Dinesh Kant Kumar under the joint funding of the University of Stuttgart BA and ISSNIP. Prof Weghorn presented a seminar entitled Wireless sensors from simple mobile phones. A hands-on tutorial on J2ME (Java for mobile devices) was also conducted.

A/P K.T. Ko from the City University of Hong Kongsponsored by ISSNIP, visited the University of Melbourne from the 3rd July to the 24th August 2006. The main collaborators were Professor Palaniswami and Professor Zukerman of the University of Melbourne. The main tasks accomplished during A/P Kos visit were: (1) co-operation in research grant applications in both Hong Kong and Australia; (2) finalised and submitted a paper entitled Stability Effects of Two-way Traffic to the Journal of Computer Communications; (3) presentations at the University of Melbourne, the University of Adelaide and DSTO.

Prizes/Awards

ISSNIP Postgraduate Networking Awards

Number of Awards: 10 in 2007

Total Amount: Up to $7,500 per person

Application Closing Date: April 30th 2007

Application Procedure: Send the project description (Max 4 pages) to Ms. Georgi Cahill (g.cahill@ee.unimelb.edu.au), Executive Assistant, ARC RN ISSNIP. The document should contain the postgraduate student involved with affiliation, details about the supervisor of the project, motivation of the project, proposed networking activity and a brief budget on how the money would be spent.

Conditions of the Award:

1. Supervisor should be a member of ARC Research network on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information processing.

2. The awardees will have to assist ISSNIP in organizing workshops and visits by high profile researchers.

3. Justification of the budget should be given.

4. The students should present their work in Melbourne in October-November 2007.

5. Money can be spent on networking activities and visits. Some overseas conference travel may also be funded depending on the quality of the conference and the accepted paper.

ISSNIP Early Career Researcher Networking Awards

Number of Awards: 10 in 2007

Total Amount: Up to $10,000 per person

Application Closing Date: April 30th 2007

Application Procedure: Send the project description (Max 4 pages) to Ms. Georgi Cahill (g.cahill@ee.unimelb.edu.au), Executive Assistant, ARC RN ISSNIP. The document should contain the details about the early career researcher with affiliation, recommendation from one of the ARC RN ISSNIP members (not required if the ECR himself is a member), motivation of the project, proposed networking activity and a brief budget on how the money would be spent.

Conditions of the Award:

1. Recommendation from one of the ARC RN ISSNIP members (not required if the ECR himself/herself is a member).

2. The awardees will have to assist ISSNIP in organizing workshops and visits by high profile researchers.

3. Justification of the budget should be given.

4. The ECR should attend the ECR workshop to be held in Melbourne in October-November 2007.

5. Money can be spent on networking activities and visits. Some overseas conference travel may also be funded depending on the quality of the conference and the accepted paper.

Visiting Researchers

Dr Andre de Carvalhofrom the University of Sao Paulo is visiting Central Queensland University. He is currently working on applications of Computational Intelligence in Sensor Fusion for an Artificial Tongue, Gene Recognition and Analysis of Gene Expression.

DrMarcelo Espinozafrom the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven isvisitingthe University of Melbourne. He is applying the technique of LS-SVM on the analysis of financial data, and the prediction of link-layer traffic as used in energy-efficient link-layer jamming attacks.

Prof Mohan Kumarfrom the University of Texas, Arlington is visiting Curtin University of Technology and is working in the area of middleware for WSNs.

Prof Ramesh Jainfrom the University of California, Irvine, will visit Curtin University of Technology in August for a week, and will work on the multimedia aspects of WSNs.